I’ve spent the last 15 years working for The New York Times, Dow Jones and Forbes, with minor stints at The New Yorker, InStyle and Vogue, among others. I've worked on the agency and corporate side, too, writing mainly for C-level and affluent readers. Fat Cats is drawn from that world—rich people and how they use money, for better and for worse, especially in the areas I care about: horse racing, food sourcing, politics and culture.
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Five Reasons Why Tesco's Horse Meat Scandal Could Happen Here

One burger contains the DNA of many cows from different plants and even countries. (USDA/Wikimedia image)

While everyone is making jokes about the Polish horse meat that contaminated Tesco’s ground beef patties in the UK, lawmakers in Oklahoma and other western states are busy introducing bills to open horse slaughter plants for human consumption here in the U.S.

Below are five reasons why the Tesco scandal could play out in rural America if they succeed—and why food safety issues with contaminated horse meat are a far bigger threat to consumers than the industry is admitting.

Reason #1: A single beef burger contains the DNA of many different cows

Your average burger is a big mash-up of edible scraps and parts from different cows from different plants, often from different states (and even countries), with fat and additives ground in, all of which makes Polish horse meat ending up in Irish beef patties a bit easier to understand. Yes, it could happen here.

Dr. Lester Castro Friedlander, DVM, used to see “big tubs of beef from different plants ground together” at plants were he was a USDA inspector and also a top inspection trainer. “This makes it difficult to trace liability to any particular plant in the case of e-coli contamination,” says Dr. Friedlander.

As part of a year-long investigation, The Kansas City Star went inside four of America’s largest packing plants (Cargill, JBS, Tyson and National Beef), photographing a plant in Dodge City where tubs of scraps and cuts waited to be ground into burgers, just like the ones Dr. Friedlander talked about. The practice was also exposed in a 2009 New York Times article, “The Burger That Shattered Her Life.”

E-coli contamination is a high risk as both the Star and New York Times articles reveal. And as the Tesco situation shows, it’s not just disparate parts of different cattle from different plants and countries that find their way into burger meat, but pork and horse meat as well, all crossing borders (and datelines) and sold to unwary customers without proper labeling.

Reason #2: Oklahoma wants to cash in on slaughtering racehorses, mustangs and other equines not raised as meat animals.

Rural U.S. lawmakers with ties to the cattle industry and economically-strapped horse breeding registries have been pushing to reopen horse slaughter plants in the states since the last three plants shut down in 2007 (two in Texas, one in Illinois).

Over the past 12 months, they’ve tried unsuccessfully to overturn Texas’ state slaughter ban and pass pro-slaughter legislation in Tennessee. They’ve also tried (and failed so far) to open plants in New Mexico, Oregon and Missouri.

This coming Tuesday (February 5), lawmakers are poised to try again in Oklahoma when a new bill, SB375, is scheduled for a second reading in the state’s Agriculture and Rural Development Committee.

What’s behind it are the 140,000-150,000 U.S. horses that are now being slaughtered in Canada and Mexico for markets overseas plus about 45,000 mustangs unwisely removed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from public lands and warehoused at taxpayer expense to make more room for cattle grazing. This is a wasteful program but “welfare cattle grazing,” the reason most commonly blamed for the removals, is even more wasteful of taxpayer dollars.

These horses, many held in long-term holding pens in Oklahoma, are considered “excess” by the BLM and there are quite a few people in the meat trade who’d happily buy them cheap and sell them at a large profit to slaughter plants (in fact, they’ve been doing this illegally for some time, as revealed in the National Journal article, “Is the U.S. Government Complicit in the Killing of Over 1,000 Wild Horses?” as well as in an investigation reported on in The Desert Independent).

They also want to slaughter horses disposed of by racetracks, rodeos, horse breeders and owners struggling in the recession—a sizeable surplus market that has made the actual raising of horses as meat animals (similar to cattle) completely unnecessary in the U.S. for decades.

Oklahoma Senator Mark Allen is trying to harness that business for his home state, which ranks fourth in the nation in horse ownership per capita. His bill (SB375) would overturn Oklahoma’s existing 1963 ban on selling and producing horsemeat—a somewhat dodgy maneuver, given Oklahoma’s present billing as the “horse show capital of the U.S.”

The state also happens to have several struggling racetracks as well as a large cattle industry. Ignoring the branding problem of slaughtering horses in “the horse show capital of the U.S,” there are huge food-safety problems connected to slaughtering horses that have been ignored for years and that the Tesco and Burger King debacles are slowly bringing to light.

That’s the news from a Jan. 28 Daily Mail article, and there are countless others just like it popping up all over the media.

What they reveal about dangerous drugs turning up in horse meat isn’t just specific to the UK, though; it’s relevant here—especially since U.S. horses are more medicated than anywhere in the world with drugs banned in food animals by the FDA. Even one-time use of most of them is illegal in any animal slaughtered for human consumption.

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THANK YOU, Vickery! Many of us came into this when we found out the ugly truth about the Department of Interior/BLM Wild Horse and Burro program and the connection to Horse slaughter. Once informed, it is impossible to “look the other way”. One by one, each and every legislator who is pushing this must be singled out. The public needs to know WHAT money is funding it. There is far too much at stake to ever let up. Thank you for your continued vigilance:

http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=3099 Oklahoma’s Mystery Meat On Tuesday, February 5, Oklahoma lawmakers will introduce bills SB375 and HB1999 to the state’s Agriculture and Rural Development Committee. A couple of obscure agriculture bills in a faraway red state might not seem to be urgent political fare, but if you make the mistake of eating hamburgers, of if you care about treating animals with dignity, you should keep a close eye on the fate of these initiatives. Together, they represent the most insidious effort we’ve seen in decades to expand the scope of industrially produced animal products. SB 375 effectively seeks to authorize the opening of horse slaughterhouses in Oklahoma. The last horse slaughter plants in the United States were shut down in 2007. This left the United States to ship upwards of 200,000 horses (many of them mustangs removed by the Bureau of Land Management to clear space for cattle) to Canadian and Mexican abattoirs, from where the meat goes to European markets. Oklahoma, which keeps a substantial portion of these horses in holding pens, is eager to keep this business local. What it would it also like to keep local is the resulting flesh. HB1999 aims to legalize the production and sale of horsemeat, or, as one interested party insisted that we now call it: “cheval.” To think that this meat will not end up in the nation’s beef supply is to misunderstand the industrial food system. Recently, Polish horsemeat was found in Irish burgers. The average American burger is subject to the same unregulated adulteration. As Forbes’ Vickery Eckhoff writes, “Your average burger is a big mash-up of edible scraps and parts from different cows from different plants, often from different states (and even countries), with fat and additives ground in, all of which makes Polish horse meat ending up in Irish beef patties a bit easier to understand.” She adds, “Yes, it could happen here.” Of course, it’s illegal to incorporate horsemeat into ground beef. But, realistically speaking, that hardly matters. The corrupt underbelly of animal agriculture will digest anything. There’s zero regulation of what scraps from where enter into the meat’s labyrinthian supply chain. Oklahoma, with its “struggling racetracks” happy to dispose of “spent” horses alongside its sizable cattle industry is watering at the mouth, I would imagine, to feed the world cheap tubes of mystery meat. It’s not hard to envision a scenario whereby scraps from slaughterhouses are consolidated, processed, and incorporated as ground beef filler. It’s hard to understate how wealthy this culinary combo would make some people. In the meantime, Contact the Chair of the Agriculture and Rural Development Committee in Oklahoma that has the power to decide whether to hear SB375 or not. Thank you! Senator Eddie Fields 2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Rm. 416 Oklahoma City, OK 73105 (405) 521-5581 efields@oksenate.gov Executive Assistant: Betsy Ingraham

At a time in US economic history when funding for vital programs, like USDA meat inspections, are being continually cut in lieu of something more ‘corporate’, diligence in food safety here has become a cosmic joke (until undercover video is released on YouTube…). Research shows that in the US, horse meat has never been a favored choice but rather a choice of circumstance, and the most popular use for horsemeat here was DOG FOOD. Is it the standard practice of politicians to exploit a voided niche? Um…YES. But those statesmen and women who seek to exploit a perceived excess of horse flesh on US soil will find the weight of Public opinion and the legal steps we’re willing to take still carries a helluva sting. We will not be ‘dismissed’. Perhaps this reason alone is why politicians don’t attempt to stop the meat grinder at it’s sources – regulation of breeding where and when the markets don’t exist or a serious examination of the inequities of the Wild Horse and Burro Program: It’s simply easier to foist an unpopular agenda on a (theoretically) powerless Public.

And yet the cattle industry actively promotes horse slaughter and spends billions lobbying for it. Their reason – according to them at least – is the slippery slope crap that Sue Wallis and cronies have been pushing at them for years. One would THINK they would have sense enough to see through such drivel, but they are SO paranoid they fall all over themselves in opposition to welfare legislation for ANY animal.

Thank you Vickery Eckhoff for this fabulous article! The world truly needs to wake up to the inhumane barbaric act associated with horse slaughter; the horses that are victims to such betrayal; and the drug issues with such meat. It is a house of horrors from animal welfare to food safety. It must be shut down permanently! Thank you for bringing awareness to such an important issue around the world.

Now that Burger King UK has admitted to knowing of the contaminated horsemeat problem in their restaurants, I do hope the ramificiations will ripple “across the pond” and into the consciousness of our American food and safety psyche. People do not know what they are eating, and they assume that it is OK because we have USDA and FSIS and over-hyped “experts” such as T. Grandin acting as if they know everything when they, in fact, know shamefully little. And do even less to protect us, the American folks who fund their jobs. It disgusts me. It is frustrating and it’s not getting any better, for either the horses, or for the general public who (knowingly or unknowingly) is eating them. Your piece is a reveal that needs to go BIG.

Thank-you for this very informative article. Food safety is becoming of greater concern daily, and the possible inclusion of a “non-food” animal, horses with drugs, is absolutely alarming. It is past time for our government agencies to uphold their fiduciary responsibility to the public, and horses should definitely be “off the table”.

IMPORTANT – Has there been any USDA DNA tests on American Beef? How do we know that horsemeat has not been in American hamburgers??????? Demand Burger King submit to a USDA DNA tests………….I amgetting sick thinking I have eaten meats …..what about my Jewish friends????? OMG